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there is no influence so good and gracious as Wordsworth's, so 

 directly sanative, to those who have felt a relaxation of fibre, from 

 long pondering on the 'riddle of the painful earth,' or brooding 

 over the antinomies of our intellectual and moral nature. 

 There is a well-known sense of hopelessness, when one is 

 beaten down before the mysteries of the universe, if these 

 have been wrestled with and found insoluble, and a feeling 

 of languor and indifference — the ad bono feeling — is incipient. 

 To one, in such a mood of apathy or life-weariness, the in- 

 fluence of Wordsworth is incomparable. His poetry is a moral 

 tonic, reinvigorating the heart, by taking it straight away to some 

 fresh natural well of feeling, or of thought. Great as he is 

 therefore, as a poet, I consider him still greater as a moralist. His 

 sense of the infinite moral unity of which we are but parts, and his 

 conviction of a 



Central peace, subsisting at the heart 

 Of endless agitation, 



are as guide-posts in ethics. In the forest paths of human life, 

 with their labyrinthine windings, or, when out in the open, cross- 

 ways meet and perplexity is inevitable, he, of all poets, best helps 

 you to know where you are, what direction to take, and how to 

 travel forward with serenity, and even with joy. If his teaching — 

 as embodied, for example, in the Ode to Duty, or in the chapter of 

 The Excursion entitled "Despondency Corrected,"- — is inconsistent 

 with a Goethean sweep and universality, delighting in all things 

 with frank objectivity, simply because they are, its narrowness is the 

 narrowness of one who has a root in himself, of one who has found 



Within himself a measure and a rule. 

 And one, thus taught and disciplined, will ' live and breathe,' as 

 he says — 



For noble purposes of mind ; his heart 

 Beats to the heroic song of ancient days ; 

 His eye distinguishes, his heart creates. 



In all that I have said, I have been giving you the merest 

 introduction to the poetry and poetic mission of Wordsworth. 

 Those of you who have not yet begun the earnest study of this 

 poet — and he requires not only to be read but to be studied — may 



